Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The election of Donald Trump as president was a (legal) coup against the military-industrial complex that has dominated the US for decades. The people who have benefited from that dominance are now staging a counter-coup. In staging a coup like the one we have just seen, the coup leaders, even if moved by genuinely populist concerns, have to enlist the aid of many, many powerful people, in order to resist the counter-coup, or they will fail. The resistance to any such coup will be fierce: there are trillions of dollars at stake here! The leaders of the counter-coup have a multitude of resources at their disposal: they have already corrupted most of the "free press" to act as their toadies, so they can easily spread anti-coup propaganda in national media outlets. They understand psychological manipulation, so they will enlist the aid of many well-meaning but naive people by making them believe they are opposing "racism," or "sexism," or "homophobia....

The mathematics lecturer said he was next going to discuss "the Menger sponge." "Ah," I thought, "he's going to discuss that bloody socialist Wieser ! I'll bet he sponged off of Menger all the time!" But no, it turned out he discussed this: (Actually named after Carl Menger's son, by the way.)

My math lecturer just called this: A "map of England"! A few of centuries of propaganda can be quite effective!

I just read an intelligent economist (not an oxymoron, I swear!) claiming that market exchange "guarantees" that in an unfettered free market, goods go to the people with the highest valued use for them. Sigh. What about the ability to pay? Let's say we establish a market in human organs, as many libertarians advocate. And further imagine this market is unregulated, something of which they would no doubt approve. In such a market, there will be many poor people who need kidneys. But imagine that George Soros likes to have a dozen grilled human kidneys for breakfast every day. Poor people in need of a transplant might very well value those kidneys much more highly than Soros (i.e., if we gave them each a billion dollars, they would easily outbid him for them on a free market) -- but they simply lack the funds to compete with his voracious kidney appetite. It is reasonable to contend that the price we pay for the benefits of free markets is that sometimes rich peo...

In the comments on this post , rob argues that a bunch or "circuits" (or neurons, I guess) behaving according to deterministic, mechanical laws is exactly what "gives rise" to intelligence, in humans or computers. The problem with this view is Occam's razor . Let us consider a door lock. If the lock is set, one can't open the door without a key (at least without breaking it). We can see why this is so on simple, mechanical principles. Now, it just could be that the door "knows" when it is supposed to let people in who don't have the key, and when it shouldn't. But generally we reject any such hypothesis as superfluous: once we understand how the door mechanically does its job, we simply don't need to posit any "knowing": it won't "do any work" in our explanation of when we can get in the house and when we can't. Now let's say we add some biometric feature to the door: the owner can still get in by f...

I am searching for an assembly language simulator for I can teach my Operating Systems students how processes work at the CPU level. In the course of doing so, I came across this site , and found: 10110000 01100001 The first few bits (10110) are an instruction to copy a value into a register. The next three digits (000) identify the register which the value will be copied into. The rest of it (01100001) is the value which is to be copied. Of course 10110 is meaningless, and the computer doesn't "know" that it means "copy the value." The processor is designed so that the series of electrical impulses represented by 10110 (on-off-on-on-off) causes the desired result. This is part of what is meant by "mechanical." Yesiree. Maybe if all of the AI true believers had to program in assembly for a month, they'd all realize, "Oh yeah, it's just a bunch of circuits performing that exact mechanical operations I set up for them to perform."...